Microsoft Teams offer new collaboration features like Office Store

At its annual Build 2017 conference in Seattle, Microsoft announced a few updates for its Teams developer platform. Developers will also be able to bring more features to Teams in the future.

Microsoft Teams — a new app experience

Thanks to its new set of features, developers will be able to deliver their apps for Teams using the Office Store. Teams will be featured in a new “discover apps experience” section that will offer it more visibility. Users will see a new “compose extensions” panel in the preview that will allow users to add commands to draw information from the integrated apps and service in the chat.

There will also be available support for third-party notifications in Microsoft Teams. The Teams activity feed will allow developers to build new features into apps and these will alert users of important information in the feeds section.

Microsoft’s response to Slack

This seems to be Microsoft’s response to Slack, but unlike it, Microsoft features its own ecosystem of Office apps, which means that they will become better integrated with Teams. This will include a vast range of Microsoft apps such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, and so on. To all this, Microsoft will add more than 150 integrations from third-parties with a corporate focus. Like this, Microsoft entertains the possibility for another winner this year.

Slack is an app which has become a favorite amongst startups because it’s free. Teams offer strong competition to it even if Microsoft hasn’t quite revolutionized the collaboration game just yet.